Thursday, February 15, 2018

I've spent a few days watching a Twitter conversation erupt into a debate on journalism practices, which began with a post from Suzie Dawson regarding an article due to be released by the Intercept about Wikileaks. It seemed to me and others that this article is more specifically about Assange. Unsurprising, as one of the journalists is Micah Flee, whose connections to the Freedom of the Press Foundation [FPF] and the Intercept had left me asking my own questions a few weeks ago, when I learned that the FPF board voted to block funding to Wikileaks.

This recent article was co-authored with another Intercept journalist, one Suzie specifically accused of questionable practices to obtain interviews from Wikileaks supporters. I learned just today that these were simply fans of Wikileaks and free speech, engaging in friendly chatter together in a secret group.

That last sentence should be disturbing on a few levels alone.

About a week before this unfolded, I had stumbled across a video featuring former FBI whistleblower and founder of Newsbud, Sibel Edmonds. She was mentioned in Mike Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon, which we recently excerpted here. In the video below, Sibel interviews investigative journalist, Whitney Webb of Mintpress News about the founder of the Intercept. It was eyeopening to say the least. What has followed has been a rabbit hole and what has been seen cannot be unseen.

I'm still working on my own piece about press freedoms in light of many startling revelations but I wished to present the links for each of the articles I read below along with Sibel's in depth interview without further comment. I wanted a lead-in as to the 'why'. I feel certain this is not over and it will be important to understanding events at home and abroad in future. I'll do my best to update this post with new responses to allegations or counter arguments from those engaged in this incredibly vital discussion about free speech and press freedoms. ~ GJP

This is the story that the Intercept ran the day after I viewed Sibel Edmonds' interview w/Whitney Webb.Curious -- since the owner of the Intercept paid for the Snowden docs -- why is US uninterested in negotiating to obtain those? Are they a 'nothing burger' or 'fake news'?

Webb delves deep into Omidyar’s long-ongoing multi-billion dollar partnership with government agencies, including the CIA and NSA, questionable coincidences and ties between Omidyar -Snowden, Glenn Greenwald’s hushed contract and arrangements with Omidyar to privatize Snowden’s 500+k page leak, Freedom of Press Foundation’s betrayal of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, and much more. Do not miss this explosive interview exposing the new trend in intercepting and neutralizing whistleblowers and their information.

[Like TRC] Newsbud does not take money from advertisers, foundations or NGO’s. You can support a stronger independent grassroots media by subscribing or making a donation today. [I just did this week.] Support Newsbud: http://bit.ly/2uah4H6 || Show Notes: http://bit.ly/2FlTHQz

No discussion of the events before, during, and after 9/11 is either complete
or intellectually honest without looking at Israel. Since 9/11, three nations
— the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel — have stood virtually alone
as a tripartite alliance in complete support of the Empire’s actions. One of the best
questions to ask after any major event is Cui bono? “Who benefits?” And here,
Israel, the largest recipient of US military and economic aid, has ranked at, or near,
the top of the list in almost every world development. There is some good, and
much that is bad, to be said about Israel and its actions. But almost every attempt
at rational discourse on the question of the use of Israeli power has been hobbled
by emotional, almost hysterical preconceptions — either pro or con — that miss
some very important pieces of the new, accurate map I have been trying to draw
for you.

Many of the top members of the Bush administration have exceptionally close ties
with the Israeli government. These include the former Chairman of the Pentagon’s
Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz;
Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Edward Luttwak of the National
Security Study Group; Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon’s Chief Financial Officer on 9/11;
Elliot Abrams at the National Security Council, and Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.
Some have even worked on joint planning projects with Israeli ministries. These
relationships alone make Israel a subject worthy of discussion. These and many
other Israeli-connected experts formed the core group at the Project for a New
American Century that had drafted plans for the invasion of Iraq long before 9/11.

This chapter is a brief effort to put some very important pieces into place. And
I should say at the outset that none of my research has found any compelling data
to suggest that Israel was the architect or mastermind of the attacks of September
11, as is obvious from the preceding chapters. It would have been impossible for
the Israeli government to have so compromised US intelligence, military, economic,
and political systems as to have had control of the operation, not to
mention the full and unquestioning cooperation of the American mid-level functionaries
needed to execute it.

I’m repeating that statement here because it’s so important to prevent the very
common shaming, diversionary behavior illustrated by the following vignette: A
colleague of mine who has been tireless in his efforts to distribute evidence of US
government complicity in the attacks approached FOX News commentator Chris
Matthews at a post-9/11 book signing. After he waited in line and then tried to
place some of the evidence I’ve described in this book in Matthews’s hands — a
Quixotic effort in my opinion — Matthews asked him, “This isn’t one of those
‘The Israelis did it’ things, is it?”

This shows how little real analysis is being done by the media, but it also shows
the way valid questions are deflected or intentionally ignored by shame-based, propagandistic
rhetoric. Any criticism of Israel tends to get dishonestly recast as
anti-Semitism. So let’s get a couple of things straight. Israel is not Judaism.

One is a state and the other is a religion. For centuries, Muslims and Jews lived
side by side in relative tranquility in the Middle East. And during the Middle Ages
it was the Muslims who gave Jews fleeing European Christian persecution safe
haven in the Holy Land, where each group generally practiced its own religion in
peace. A single day’s reading in the Torah, the New Testament, and the Koran is
enough to show that within each monotheist sacred text are passages of exclusivity
and intolerance and other passages urging accord and acceptance. Islam is typical
here; and while it takes a dim view of polytheist cultures like Hinduism, much of
the Koran teaches that Jews should be good Jews and that Christians should be
good Christians.

The term “anti-Semitism” refers to a European social and political phenomenon
(which, like much of European pre-World War II ideology, still lingers in
some places, e.g., Japan). Anti-Jewish feeling, thought, and behavior are as old as
monotheism itself and have undergone almost as many transformations. There’s
the anti-Judaism of late antiquity; the massacres against Jews in the Crusades and
the Inquisition, the murderous pogroms by rural European peasants in the 18th
and 19th centuries, the middle-class resentment, mythologizing, and persecution
that led to the Dreyfuss Affair in 1890s France, and a massive wave of hatred
toward Jews that came upward from European folk ideology and downward from
fascist and rightist parties and governments in the first half of the 20th century.
Like all forms of bigotry, “Anti-Semitism” remains a serious problem all over the
world. But the phrase itself has no real anthropological basis; it dates from the
1870s, when most European writers still divided up the world’s peoples according
to Biblical categories — “Semites” were thought to be descended from Noah’s
son Shem, while everybody else came from either Ham or Japhet. In fact,
Antisemitismus was invented as part of an effort by German racist authors to
replace the religion-based Jew-hatred (Judenhass) of the past with a more modern,
ethnicity-driven contempt. Of course, this apparently intellectual construct barely
masked a deep reservoir of anti-rational, virulent hatred. It formed the basis for
the pseudo-scientific racism of the Nazi movement.

So the term shouldn’t be used to refer to the attitudes of either side in the Arab-Israeli
conflict, where it’s misleading and inapt. As is often pointed out, Arabs and
Jews are both called “Semitic” peoples. More importantly, “Anti-Semitism” is worse
than useless in any discussion of Israeli domestic and international affairs. To talk
about Israel as if its every citizen thought, felt, and acted as a unit in some giant
monolithic crowd is as unfair as assuming that every American supports all of the
US government’s actions, its economic policies, and its militarism with exactly the
same degree of feeling and for exactly the same reasons. Clearly, within Israel there
are hugely divergent opinions on everything including the occupied territories and
settlements, Palestinian history and politics, the conduct of Israel’s foreign and
domestic policies, and the vexing issue of compulsory military service. And Israel
has a sizeable antiwar movement opposing the invasion of Iraq by the US. So what
is important (indeed, essential) to examine are the actions of the Israeli government,
in exactly the same way that we have examined the actions of the US government.
Supporters of the state of Israel are often hysterically unable to tolerate that kind of
critique, as though they know (all-too consciously in some cases, perhaps unconsciously
in others) that a clear examination of Israel’s national conduct reveals a
pattern of stark horrors. This sort of denial is best maintained by ad hominem
attacks, the most effective being the easy slander of anti-Semitism; if you’re having
any trouble preventing criticism of Israel, call the critic a bigot and it’s all over.

Sometimes those reactions are triggered by the genuine anxiety that remains a
permanent feature of Jewish life since the Holocaust. But it’s very common for
journalists (say, Chris Matthews), politicians, officials, and disinformationists to
squander, sabotage, or abort an exceedingly important debate by turning on the
red megaphone that warns against what isn’t there.

To say that Israel did not perpetrate the attacks of 9/11 is not to deny that the
Israeli government was very close to those attacks and may have played a role in
them. There is evidence that points both ways. On the one hand it is clear that
Mossad made several attempts to warn the US government that the attacks were
coming — in one case even providing the US government with a list that included
the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, including Mohammed Atta and that
charmed pair, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar.1 Everybody knew the attacks
were coming. Yet even after this information was in American hands, various agencies
of the US government allowed Alhazmi and Almidhar to roam free and unmolested.

The analysis of insider trading by the Herzliya Institute for Counterterrorism
(ICT) is another example of Israeli action pointing toward, rather than away from,
evidence that the CIA knew what was going on and allowed the attacks to happen.

But perhaps the most compelling reason to discount assertions that Israel was
the primary executor of the attacks is the following UPI story, which is one of the
most overlooked bombshells in the whole 9/11 saga:

A leaked Federal Aviation Administration memo written on the evening of
September 11 contains disturbing revelations about American Airlines Flight 11, the first to hit the World Trade Center. The “Executive Summary,” based on information
relayed by a flight attendant to the American Airlines Operation Center,
stated “that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B
at 9:20 a.m. The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin, shot by passenger Satam Al
Suqami.” The FAA has claimed that the document is a “first draft,” declining to
release the final draft, as it is “protected information,” noting the inaccuracies in
reported times, etc. The final draft omits all mention of gunfire. Lewin, a 31-year old
American-Israeli citizen was a graduate of MIT and Israel’s Technion. Lewin
had immigrated to Israel with his parents at age 14 and had worked at IBM’s
research lab in Haifa, Israel. Lewin was a co-founder and chief technology officer
of Akamai Technologies and lived in Boston with his family. A report in Ha’aretz
on September 17 identified Lewin as a former member of the Israel Defense Force
Sayeret Matkal, a top-secret counter-terrorist unit, whose Unit 269 specializes in
counter-terrorism activities outside of Israel.2

This particular story raises a multitude of questions. Guns were on the hijacked
flights? How did they get there? Why have they not been mentioned? What was
someone with Lewin’s background doing sitting in front of one of the hijackers on
the day of the hijackings? Was he still active? Mere coincidence is nearly impossible
here. So the question becomes: did the hijackers — all nineteen of them — plan
their activities to kill Lewin, or was Lewin following the hijackers even into the
gates of death? Did they have to kill him to complete their mission? Who had penetrated
whom, and who had compromised Lewin’s presence on the plane hijacked
by Mohammed Atta? One thing is absolutely clear from my vantage point: someone
at the highest levels of the Israeli government deemed Lewin expendable.

Behind the fragile logic and the false rumors that thousands of Jews didn’t show
up for work at the World Trade Center on 9/11 lie deeper truths that raise darker
questions. As a classic piece of disinformation, the rumor about Jews not showing
up for work — latched onto by prejudiced and undisciplined minds — made it
impossible to rationally discuss such things as the Zim Israeli-American shipping
lines having vacated their offices in the World Trade Center just a week before the
attacks and moving to Norfolk, Virginia. Two sources told me on condition of
anonymity that Zim broke its lease to make the move.

The disinformation worked like a charm. Here’s one example: an African American
poet, Amiri Baraka, nearly lost his post as Poet Laureate of New Jersey
in an apparent reprisal for his embrace of this particular rumor. Just a month after
9/11, Baraka published “Somebody Blew Up America,” a passionately internationalist
poem against fascism in all its forms. But he didn’t do enough homework,
and a single line, “Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home
that day?” touched off a small storm of boring controversy that clogged much of
the Black press, the Jewish press, and the regional mainstream press for weeks. It’s
unfortunately true (and rarely noted) that Baraka has written some very bigoted
poems in the past 35 years, but “Somebody Blew Up America” is not one of them. Yet it’s the one that got all the noise, and the whole episode helped to shut down
any legitimate discussion of Israeli foreknowledge and possible involvement in
9/11. Those who believed the rumor think they needn’t look further, and those
who rejected it think the same, for opposite reasons.

So let’s take a critical and rational look at Israel based upon facts. Let’s stop to
examine the truth behind an Israeli spy ring that was operating all over the United
States before 9/11 and documented by the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA. And then,
let’s try to place Israel within the context of 21st century transnational fascism and
the new order evolving at the end of the age of oil.

The record

Let’s compare the violation of UN resolutions by Israel and by Iraq.

IRAQ:

• UN Resolutions violated, ignored: 16

• Countries attacked, invaded, violated: Iran, Kuwait

• Countries occupied for years: None

• Countries currently occupying: None

• Territory illegally annexed: None

• Wars started: 1980, 1990

• Possesses weapons of mass destruction: Unverified as of this writing.
(However, evidence has surfaced this year showing that the
United States provided Iraq with bioweapons material for, among
other things, anthrax, plague, smallpox, and West Nile virus, as well
as materials for the manufacture of chemical weapons during the
1980s. Iraq also likely possesses small quantities of nerve agents such
as CS, GB (Sarin), and VX gasses. But these are not legally or intuitively
weapons of mass destruction. These gases dissipate and
become harmless roughly 30 minutes after being deployed on the
battlefield.)

• Possesses nuclear weapons: No.

• Most notable atrocity against civilians: Mass killings of Kurds and
Shi’ite Muslims numbered at less than 5,000 per incident. (New
information from CIA records and testimony this year shows that
Iraq — as widely reported — was not guilty of gassing as many as
100,000 Kurds in the early 1990s. It was Iran, concerned about separatist
sentiments in its own Kurdish population.)3

• Most notable atrocity against civilians: 17,500 Lebanese civilians
killed in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon

• Currently under a regime of UN sanctions: No

Most of this material was compiled by Richard B. Du Boff of Bryn Mawr
University and published by al Jazeera in September of 2002. The parenthetical
comments are mine.4

Ariel Sharon

Having narrowly escaped (on a technicality) prosecution in Belgium for a 1982
three-day orgy of killing and rape at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps that
occurred when he led an invasion of Lebanon and controlled the area as Israeli
defense minister, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was also charged with brutal 2001
and 2002 human rights violations in the Jenin and Nablus townships of the occupied
territories in Palestine. In post-9/11 Israeli incursions, many innocent civilians
were killed, houses were bulldozed, and people were left homeless and without
food, water, or medical supplies in areas totally surrounded by Israeli Defense
Forces (IDF).5

Covert operations and 9/11 connections

An Israeli owned company, ICTS, had a contract to provide security at Boston’s
Logan airport, from which 9/11 Flights 11 and 175 originated. And either directly
or through subsidiaries it had contracts at every other airport where planes were
hijacked on 9/11. The same company was apparently well aware that alleged shoe
bomber Richard Reid was connected to al Qaeda, and yet they still allowed him
to board the Paris-US flight he tried to blow up. If the UPI story about a gun on
Flight 11 is correct, then this might help explain how it got through screening.6

FBI sources were quoted in an ABC News story indicating that five employees
of an Israeli-owned moving company were on the roof of their truck in New York
City with photographic equipment as the attacks were occurring on 9/11. A former
CIA official confirmed that the names of several had turned up in an
intelligence database, and the men were subsequently deported.7

In December of 2002 Palestinian security forces arrested a group of Palestinians
for acting as agents provocateurs in collaboration with Israel. Those arrested had
been posing as al Qaeda operatives in attempts to discredit Palestinians in the eyes
of the US and the world and to buttress Sharon’s claims that al Qaeda cells were operating in regions where the IDF has been engaging in brutal operations. A follow-up
story in Israel’s Ha’aretz confirmed some details of the Palestinian
allegations and disputed others.8 Historically, there has been no connection
between al Qaeda and the Palestinian cause.

In June of 2002 six men carrying Israeli passports who had been previously
detained by the INS later became the subjects of a manhunt after US authorities
feared that they might be plotting terror attacks, possibly on the Alaska pipeline or
a Florida nuclear reactor. Release of the men — after confirming that their passports
were valid — by the INS before contacting the FBI reportedly made FBI
Director Mueller “furious.”9

In the fall of 2002 a well-financed ring of Israeli computer hackers began a sabotage
and eavesdropping campaign against interests in America that had been critical
of Israel and supportive of Palestinian interests. One of the targets was University of
Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle. The tactics used included the
rewriting of text on certain websites, the sending of phony emails intended to create
animosity or discredit the victim, and deluging targets with tens of thousands of
messages. The ring, operating from Israeli occupied territory, was eventually tracked
down and exposed.10

In August of 2002 a Zim Antwerp ship, operated by Israel, was seized in Germany.
It was filled with weapons and munitions headed for Iran. The firm, closely connected
to the Israeli government, had been licensed to export the cargo to Thailand, but
German intelligence had apparently determined that the final destination was Iran.11

In another backfired covert operation, what was originally heralded as a dramatic
January 2002 Red Sea interception of an Iranian ship filled with weapons
headed for Palestine turned out to be a major embarrassment for the Israeli government.
The Karine A, contrary to what the Israelis had asserted, was not a
Palestinian or Iranian vessel, and the whole affair was likely manipulated to provide
a propaganda edge for Ariel Sharon as US envoys met with Palestinian
officials. Lloyd’s of London produced documents proving certain parts of the
Israeli story false and disproving Israeli claims that the weapons had been bought
in Iran by Palestinian interests.12

In 2000, after a protracted court battle, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai
Brith (ADL) lost a civil suit in California federal court after it was found that the
ADL had engaged, in cooperation with Israeli and South African intelligence agencies,
in a massive domestic spying operation against American citizens and
organizations such as Greenpeace and groups opposed to US involvement in the
Contra war. American officials who cooperated with the ADL were sometimes
given all-expenses-paid trips to Israel, where they were introduced to representatives
from the Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services. It was found that the
ADL had broken many laws by storing illegal intelligence records from local, state,
and federal law enforcement agencies. In ruling in favor of the plaintiffs a US
District Court judge permanently enjoined the ADL from engaging in any further illegal spying against “Arab-American and other civil rights groups.” Several members
of the House of Representatives were plaintiffs in the suit.13

On April 25, 2002, former Congressman Pete McCloskey of California was
awarded a $150,000 judgment against the ADL in a related case. McCloskey’s suit
was prompted by FBI and San Francisco police raids on ADL offices which discovered
that the ADL had files on almost 10,000 people across the US, and that
about 75 percent of the material had been illegally obtained. Two of the three victims
in the case who won awards were Jewish. This ruling followed a March 31, 2001,
ruling in a Denver court upholding a $10.5 million defamation judgment against the
Anti-Defamation League for falsely labeling two Colorado residents as anti-Semitic.14

To think of the ADL affair as something that originated solely with Israeli
impetus is to overlook some key historical data. In the wake of myriad violations
of US law committed by the FBI, the military, the CIA, and other government
agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially after the damning revelations of
the Frank Church (D-ID) and Otis Pike (D-NY) congressional investigations in
the mid 1970s, American agencies were forced to divest themselves of illegal
records and to cease domestic spying operations. The problem, from their point of
view, was how to hold on to data they deemed irreplaceable. The ADL, a nongovernmental
organization connected with a foreign government, seemed an
ideal solution. The solution was not without its costs.

In the 1980s the Los Angeles Police Department’s Public Disorder Intelligence
Division (PDID) was found to have been doing what was accomplished by other
agencies directly through the ADL. Ultimately some ADL connections surfaced in
the PDID case. Tens of thousands of illegal intelligence records were disclosed as
having been stored in the private residence and storage facilities rented and maintained
by LAPD Detective Jay Paul. Paul, who was later revealed to have ties to
Israeli interests, maintained many of the records on computers provided by an
ultra-right-wing group, Western Goals. Sitting at the time on the board of directors
of Western Goals was Iran-Contra figure and retired Army General John
Singlaub, a virulent anti-Communist and CIA-connected covert operative.

As the LAPD scandal was unfolding I served as one of the unnamed sources for
the Los Angeles Times’ reporting of the scandal. Although the Times stopped well
short of stating that US intelligence agencies had supported this intelligence gathering,
two decades later the pattern is very clear. The ADL was there when it was
needed. Yet in using the ADL as a plausibly deniable cutout, American intelligence
agencies at the state and federal level paid a price. They gave the ADL license to
use the data for its own purposes and created a monster that ultimately became a
liability in its own right.

The art students

A DEA report from 2001 firmly establishes that in 2000 and 2001 the United
States was entered by at least 120 Israeli intelligence operatives posing as art students.15 The M.O. of the ring was to have its members conduct street and
door-to-door sales of artwork in specific areas of interest. Some of those areas were
in Hollywood, Florida, San Diego, and Phoenix, where many of the 9/11 hijackers
had lived and trained. The investigation revealed that the areas of interest at
one level were offices of the DEA and other federal agencies and the homes of
those who worked there.

Initial reports by FOX News’s Brit Hume and Carl Cameron caused great
national interest and international reaction in December 2001 by revealing active
government investigations into the ring before and especially after 9/11. The
report disclosed that many of the ring’s activities seemed to run parallel with the
movements of several of the 9/11 hijackers. Sources have told me that the information
breaking the story was leaked to Hume by Vice President Dick Cheney at
a DC-area a cocktail party about two months after the attacks.

The FOX stories raised interesting questions about two Israeli-owned companies
in the US. One of them, Amdocs, handles almost all telephone billing records
in the United States and thus was in a position to provide invaluable intelligence
information about who was being called from what phones anywhere in the country.
The second company, Comverse, has multiple contracts to handle sensitive
wiretap operations for government agencies, and FOX reported that the Comverse
systems included a “back door” for outside parties with access to it to overhear monitored
conversations.16 This is reminiscent of the back door in PROMIS software.

Cameron’s story made it clear that federal investigators were highly concerned
about indications that suspects in the spy ring and — by implication — some of
the 9/11 hijackers were able to avoid detection and capture as a result of information
derived from these two companies. This was a bit of disinformation that
yielded great payoffs for the administration. The FOX and other stories from the
same period revealed that some 60 Israelis had been detained and deported just
after 9/11 for passport and visa violations.17

Comverse becomes especially interesting because of its relationship with the
Israeli instant-messaging firm Odigo. On September 11 employees of Odigo in
Israel received specific instant messages warning them of the attacks two hours
before they happened. Although the story received intense attention briefly, little
follow-up was done in the major press, and whatever was learned was subsequently
hidden behind veils of secrecy.18

One breathtaking connection that was overlooked by the mainstream press,
however, was that in January 2001, Comverse, along with Lazard Technology
Partners and another venture capital group, purchased a $15 million stake in
Odigo, giving it access to Odigo’s operations, accounting, and technologies.19

The FOX stories clearly implied that the Israeli operatives had not done all they
could have to help prevent the attacks and suggested that the Israelis had more
knowledge about the attacks than had been publicly disclosed. At one point Hume
asked Cameron,

Carl, I want to take you back to your report last night on those 60
Israelis who were detained in the anti-terror investigation, and the
suspicion that some investigators have that they may have picked up
information on the 9/11 attacks ahead of time and not passed it on.
There was a report, you’ll recall, that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence
agency, did indeed send representatives to the US to warn, just
before 9/11, that a major terrorist attack was imminent. How does
that leave room for the lack of a warning?

To which Cameron replied:

I remember the report, Brit. We did it first internationally right here
on your show on the 14th. What investigators are saying is that that
warning from the Mossad was nonspecific and general, and they
believe that it may have had something to do with the desire to protect
what are called sources and methods in the intelligence
community. The suspicion being, perhaps those sources and methods
were taking place right here in the United States.20

As previously noted, the Mossad warning was specific enough to have named
four of the hijackers. Again, a bit of deception by FOX, whose news director is former
Reagan and Republican Party advisor Roger Ailes. Though subtle and vague,
Hume’s implication was that Israeli operatives were assisting the terrorists. And it
was enough to spark an Internet avalanche of speculation by biased covert operations
dilettantes claiming that Israel had masterminded and executed the attacks.
Once that had started, then the question about Israel, which had apparently begun
with a leak from Dick Cheney, was misdirected and distorted into something that
the media, e.g., Chris Matthews, could effectively dismiss out of hand. And yet the
incident had cost Israel dearly in terms of prestige and credibility. Also, as we shall
see below, it had served to hide some darker truths.

Shortly after the FOX News stories, investigative journalist and former naval
and NSA intelligence officer Wayne Madsen secured a copy of the DEA report
that had started it all. It revealed a great deal more than FOX let on.

Most of the targets for walk-in sales by members of the ring were DEA offices.
The DEA did not play any central role in 9/11.

• Members of the ring also made cold-calls at the private residences of
DEA employees, federal judges, Secret Service agents, and other federal
law enforcement and military personnel. This indicates that the
ring had acquired the home addresses — quite possibly through
telephone records — of DEA employees all over the country and
was quietly making that fact known for reasons I will discuss below.
• On December 12, 2000, one Israeli named Shay Ashkenazi, when
stopped for an INS screening after entering the US, volunteered information about the art students to authorities indicating that it
was a fraud ring and actually named one of participants. Ashkenazi
told the INS officers that he was a “former Israeli intelligence officer
who was now traveling to ‘enjoy life.’” This means that one Israeli
intelligence operative tipped off the US government to the work of
other Israeli intelligence operatives.
• The ring did have very heavy operations in some areas connected
with 9/11, especially the area around Hollywood, Florida, where
Mohammed Atta and other hijackers lived and trained, San Diego,
where Alhazmi and Almidhar lived; and Phoenix, Arizona. In fact, a
group of these agents were later confirmed to have been living virtually
next door to Atta’s Florida post office box and had been surveilling him
for some time. Some of these agents had entered the US from Frankfurt,
Germany, where Atta had also lived and planned for the attacks.
• The CIA is mentioned in only one place in the report — San Diego
— where Alhazmi and Almidhar lived. The report said, “The San
Diego [DEA] Division is currently working with the FBI, Department
of State, and CIA personnel on advancing the investigation.”21

Espionage 101

Those with experience in intelligence operations will recognize some patterns to
this widespread operation. First of all, when mounting an operation of wide scope,
governments usually allow the operation to be used for multiple purposes. Within
the Israeli government there might be three or four different intelligence units that
could benefit from a large-scale deployment of covert operatives. We have already
seen how closely intertwined narcotics and intelligence operations are worldwide.
Not only does drug dealing provide, in some cases, the necessary covert funding
for the operations themselves, it is also a means of generating income for national
economies. With the United States and the CIA as the “Alpha dog” in the worldwide
drug trade, there are few areas of competition left to generate large cash flows.
One area in which Israeli organized crime has excelled, however, is in controlling
the largest market share of trafficking in the drug MDMA (Ecstasy). And the
interfaces between intelligence agencies and organized crime are well documented.

Secondly, to have a multiplicity of purposes often throws counterintelligence
personnel off the scent of the real purposes of covert operations. It is common to
have covert operations that resemble Chinese boxes — one inside the other. Not every
member of the art student ring would have known of deeper operations intended to
track the 9/11 hijackers, and for good reason. And the fact that one Israeli intelligence
operative actually tipped US authorities off to the operation might well have been a
plausibly deniable heads-up to US intelligence that the ring was here and on the move.

A close reading of the DEA report suggests that on one level it was a direct
intimidation effort aimed at various elements of the federal government. Nothing more disrupts criminal investigations than any hint that suspects have acquired the
home addresses of investigating officers and know how to find their families. In
dozens of cases, members of the ring showed up at private residences when only
wives or other relatives were at home. Some of those relatives, their suspicions
aroused, followed the art students and their canvases only to see that they had not
called on any neighboring homes. It would have been nothing for Israeli intelligence
to later hand over the addresses of these investigators to Israeli organized
crime members, who are not known for their congeniality.

Yet on a deeper level this story reveals that Israeli intelligence services were operating
as an accomplice of the US government to see that certain aspects of the attacks
would be successful, and that, if the need arose, other attacks could be prevented.
Israeli agents compromised in the operation would not have led directly to the US
government, and ultra-sensitive missions are often subcontracted between governments.
As history shows, Israel has benefited enormously since the attacks, using
the wave of emotion to brutally consolidate its positions — often to the point of
embarrassing the United States. And, when two people are both guilty of murder,
they can usually be counted on to keep their mouths shut.

An interesting side note to the art student spy scandal is the fact that after
receiving the DEA report and authenticating it, Madsen wrote a story for the
newsletter Intelligence Online published by Guillaume Dasquié, author of Forbidden
Truth. From there it was picked up by Le Monde and reignited as a story of worldwide
interest. But in early March, Madsen also took the DEA report to TV news
reporter Dale Solly at Washington’s ABC affiliate WJLA. On March 5, at the top
of the 5 PM report, Solly aired an interview with Madsen. In that report Solly
asked, “But what, if anything did they learn? At worst, Madsen says,” Solly continued,
“they had advance knowledge of the attacks and either didn’t share all of it with
US intelligence or were ignored if they did .… Late today, the FBI and DEA confirmed
the arrests. The French newspaper Le Monde called this the biggest Israeli spy case in
this country since the Jonathan Pollard case in 1986.” 22

Solly, then 53, a nonsmoker and dedicated runner, died of a sudden heart attack
on April 27. Anonymous sources who knew him stated that there was a considerable
delay in securing a statement from the coroner that the cause of death was
natural. What is harder to dismiss is the fact that one of WJLA’s newsroom directors,
Phil Smith, also died of a sudden cardiac arrest within three weeks of Solly.23

Before looking at deeper reasons why Dick Cheney would have wanted to
bring the whole matter to light, it’s necessary to look at the role of Israel in
American politics.

AIPAC and Israeli political influence

Few Washington insiders will deny that the American Israeli Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) is probably the most influential lobby in Washington. It is
not difficult to find press stories about Israeli politicians boasting that the American Congress is “controlled” by Israeli interests. Again, it is critical to find the truths
and the untruths in statements like this.

I have witnessed the power of AIPAC. In mid December 2001, while in
Washington, I happened to sit in on the mark-up of a House resolution in the
International Relations Committee. The resolution was one condemning Iraq for
its role in terrorism and its repeated violation of human rights. I walked into the
hearing room in the Rayburn office building and sat in the crowded spectator area,
which was occupied primarily by staff of the various members debating and voting
on the measure. They had come to watch an important political event in the
wake of 9/11. It proved to be more enlightening listening to the staff members —
who worked in the offices of members with whom I don’t usually do business —
than to the members themselves.

The vote started slowly, with many of the votes going against the resolution. It
seemed as though the harsh anti-Iraq resolution might fail. There had, after all,
been no evidence released that Iraq had had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks.
But then, from side doors in the rear of the hearing room, various representatives
started sticking their heads in the door long enough to say “Aye.” These were some
of the most powerful members of the committee including among others, Henry
Hyde, Ben Gilman, and Tom Lantos. As the members who were all voting in favor
of the resolution stuck their heads in the door to vote, I overhead staff members
all around me saying, “Here comes the AIPAC vote.” The staffers were cynical,
even fatalistic about the outcome. The measure passed by a wide margin, and it
was not long afterwards that I reached the conclusion that we were going to go to
war with Iraq.

Further evidence of Israeli influence over the US Congress was seen in
November 2001, when 89 out of 100 US senators signed a letter urging President
Bush not to hamper Israel’s activities in retaliation for a wave of Palestinian suicide
bombings that helped to turn Israel and Palestine into sausage factories. Justly
playing on the point that no act of terror against innocent non-combatants is justified,
the letter neglected to mention anything about the way Israel was using its
massive military might to dislocate hundreds and thousands of Palestinian citizens
who had nothing to do with the attacks.24

On August 26, as if the wishes of the Israeli government were not already
known, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon formally urged the US to begin the
invasion of Iraq as soon as possible, saying, “Any postponement of an attack on
Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose.”25

The 2002 midterm elections

Two African American members of the House fell, in large measure, as a result of
being targeted by AIPAC and pro-Israeli American Jewish organizations in their
2002 primaries before the November election. The chief crimes of Earl F. Hilliard
of Alabama and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia seem to be that they had openly supported Palestinian rights and had openly questioned the conduct of the Israeli
government. A fact that aided in McKinney’s demise was that she had long been
a vocal critic of the CIA, covert operations, and globalization under both
Presidents Clinton and Bush. And she had dared to make a public statement questioning
how much the administration knew about the attacks of 9/11 before they
happened. Shortly after this, a series of stories appeared suggesting that McKinney
actually supported terrorism because less than a half dozen campaign donors had
previously expressed support for Hamas and Hezbollah. I strongly suspect that at
least some of those donations were planted in her campaign to discredit her.

McKinney’s courageous stance made her a target of Republican interests as well
as AIPAC, and the two combined in a serious effort, using heavy crossover (and
possibly illegal) voting by Republicans and very large campaign donations from
pro-Israel organizations and interests outside of Georgia into the coffers of her
pro-Israel, pro-war, African American rival, former state judge Denise Majette.
McKinney, a five-term member of the House, lost her primary. A lawsuit challenging
the legality of the crossover vote is currently under appeal.

McKinney actually won the Democratic Party vote. Nevertheless the
Washington Post, Reuters, CNN, and the Congressional News Service all acknowledged
that she was targeted by AIPAC and out-of-state, pro-Israel funding, and
that this made the difference in her defeat.26

Just days after the 2002 midterm elections, the Jerusalem Post published a celebratory
story about how the 108th Congress would remain strongly pro-Israel,
tallying up the Jewish members of both Houses. While there is an ample, but by no
means uniform, correlation between Jewish identity and support for the state of
Israel among American Jews, that correlation is almost absolute among Jewish
members of Congress. The Jerusalem Post story noted how the 108th Congress
would bolster President Bush’s agenda for regime change in Iraq. Ironically, it cited
the strongly pro-Israel stance of the new senator from Minnesota, Norm Coleman,
as he replaced the late Senator Paul Wellstone — perhaps the only Jewish American
legislator to take a position substantively critical of Israeli policy in the occupied territories.
The Post didn’t discuss that aspect of Senator Wellstone’s legacy.27

Reaching an understanding

Israel has always spied on the US. Perhaps the most famous Israeli spy is an
American Jew named Jonathan Pollard, who compromised secret US communications
technology in the 1970s and 1980s and remains in maximum security
lock-up. Former CIA officials have categorized Pollard as perhaps the most damaging
spy ever to have betrayed his country. And in December 2001 American
physicist Richard Smyth pled guilty to illegally providing Israel with nuclear triggers
in 1982. He then spent 16 years on the run until he was captured.28 What
happened in these cases and in the case of the art students is nothing new. For
decades the Israeli desk at the CIA was the only national intelligence desk at the agency kept within the Counterintelligence Directorate. The portfolio was handled
for most of that time by the legendary alcoholic and paranoid James Jesus
Angleton, who — even today — many believe was an Israeli mole.

In short, the mutually beneficial but mutually compromising relationship between
America and Israel is the source of both geopolitical cooperation and domestic political
sabotage. When an international institution like the UN threatens to take a
position against human rights violations or aggressive warfare, Israel and the US
can generally be found opposing it together. While the US maintains its permanent
military outpost in the most oil-rich region on the planet, Israel fends off the
legitimate claims of displaced Arabs without worrying over its own strategic encirclement.
But those needs require continual surveillance and penetration of each
country by the other.

There is a compelling case that Israel acted as a partner with US intelligence
and financial interests in seeing to it that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out. Israel
had the unique HUMINT and the ELINT capabilities to track, and even quietly
protect, the 9/11 hijackers from capture without the hijackers knowing it. It also
had PROMIS software. In that role they served as a cutout for US interests and
afforded the CIA with a layer of protection. Neither the US nor Israel can afford
to have these secrets come out, and each has a blackmail option against the other.
If the claim that Dick Cheney leaked the art student story to Brit Hume is true,
then what we witnessed was the American giant disciplining its headstrong junior
partner.

And what might be Israel’s future role? Consider the moneyed interests behind
the neo-cons as a kind of corporate board. In the new world order that is emerging
after 9/11, Israel is positioning itself to occupy the position of executive vice
president in charge of Middle Eastern affairs. As it does so, the financial and military
powers of what has become an almost openly fascist world order continue to
drive humanity toward the brink of destruction.

However, as we shall soon see, there will be more very compelling evidence to
show that Israel acted as a junior partner to key US leaders to actually carry out
the attacks of 9/11.

*******

Footnotes below

Pay What You Can Tip Jar

[MCR project updates posted here]

Audio excerpts are coming soon!

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15 This report was originally made public by investigative journalist and former NSA analyst Wayne Madsen in late February and early March of 2002. Madsen obtained the report several months after FOX News stories by Carl Cameron and Brit Hume broke the initial story of the spy ring, but did not mention the DEA connections, which were central to understanding the context of the operation. The undated DEA report, extracted from a larger document, was written sometime in the summer of 2001. It can be found online at http://cryptome.org/dea-il-spy.htm

16 The four-part FOX series by Carl Cameron began on Monday December 17, 2001. Although the story was subsequently removed from the FOX web site and “spiked” as some researchers have called it, transcripts are still available through web searches and through the Federal Document Clearing House. Series archived online at https://100777.com/search/node/Carl%20Cameron

22 5 PM newscast, WJLA TV. The transcript
of the story has since been
removed from the WJLA web site.
However, I was able to recover a copy of
the original teleprompter script from the
broadcast. [Not available]

Please find links to previously released excerpts below with footnotes, which are the bulk of the work for this project. Crossing the Rubicon is over 700 pages long with upwards of 1,000 footnotes requiring updating since its 2004 release. From The Wilderness web links are estimated at double or triple that amount. Mike's administrative team sincerely appreciates your support of his legacy. TRC does not receive commission from sales of Crossing the Rubicon. Book sales help the administrator who granted permission to TRC to share excerpts and official web hosting duties.

Monday, January 1, 2018

Every American needs to watch this and have a long discussion with their families about the gravity of this in the current historical context. There is a lot of work to do -- but the work isn't what many imagine it was -- even last year.

There are those who are half-woke but afraid to speak out about what they know to be true. I find young people are far more savvy about such things as folks my age -- but then folks my age and older think I'm insane because I don't watch the Nightly News or trust NPR [or intelligence agencies, but hey, that's historically for a damn good reason]. I don't poke fun, take cheap shots or utter the word 'resistance' -- it's been a year and it does nothing except win bad comedians more awards. It only brings headaches, arguments and focuses attention on feelings rather than facts.

I haven't been able to bring myself to watch any mainstream news at all in the last 8 years. I'm used to this. It's been my job to redpill loved ones the the best way I know how. I've lost a lot of friends and loved ones in this fight. It has to be re-framed to appeal to a moral compass. I think this film is a great start.

It is a new day and a new year. I know I'm not alone. The goal should be for people who 'get it' to be able to see each other. This is how we bridge gaps, come together and work toward a greater good for citizens who wish to restore what has been so utterly corrupted. It can be done. It will take many to do it.

It doesn’t take many people to execute a conspiracy, especially when the people
involved are accustomed to dealing with compartmentalized information.
Few organizations are more familiar with compartmentalized information, and
with what happens to whistleblowers who compromise intelligence operations,
than the FBI. Indeed, the bureau is almost always the first place where people seek
help when the inevitable retributions begin. It is the first place I went in 1978 after
resigning from the LAPD with tape-recorded death threats when I knew that the
CIA was dealing drugs. Who better to know and understand what whistleblowers
face when they make their momentous decisions to come forward?

But what happens when FBI agents blow the whistle? The truth of the matter
is that many FBI agents, employees, and even military personnel did speak out,
both before and after 9/11. What they said is damning. And what has happened
to them remains a continued warning (though not an excuse) for those who still
function within the system and keep it going. The main reason why these whistleblowers
have been so thoroughly smashed is because they all threatened to expose
direct US connections to the attacks of 9/11 and those who carried them out.

White House orders

In a watershed moment two months after the World Trade Center attacks, the
BBC’s Greg Palast disclosed that shortly after taking office the Bush administration
acted to prevent an FBI investigation into two of Osama bin Laden’s brothers,
Abdullah and Omar, living in a DC suburb near CIA headquarters. With the
cooperation of veteran investigative journalist Joe Trento, Palast was actually able
to produce a classified FBI national security report disclosing the damning evidence.
The subject of the investigation was the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a charity that had been repeatedly documented as having funneled money
to terrorists.1

In the course of the broadcast Palast made these remarks:

I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a US intelligence
agency. He tells me that while there’s [sic] always been
constraints on investigating Saudis; under George Bush, it’s gotten
much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to ‘back off’
investigating the bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered
agents. I’m told that since September 11th the policy has been
reversed. FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our
findings. A spokesman said: ‘There are lots of things that only the
intelligence community knows and that no one else ought to know.’2

But the documents are more revealing, as Palast explains:

This document is marked “Secret.” Case ID — 199-Eye WF 213 589.
199 is FBI code for case type: 9 would be murder, 65 would be espionage,
199 means national security. WF indicates Washington field
office special agents were investigating ABL — because of his relationship
with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY… ABL
is Abdullah Bin Laden, president and treasurer of WAMY…
The US Treasury has not frozen WAMY’s assets, and when we
talked to them, they insisted they are a charity. Yet, just weeks ago,
Pakistan expelled WAMY operatives. And India claimed that WAMY
was funding an organisation linked to bombings in Kashmir. And the
Philippine military has accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency.
The FBI did look into WAMY, but, for some reason, agents
were pulled off the trail.
TRENTO: The FBI wanted to investigate these guys. This is not
something that they didn’t want to do — they wanted to .… they
weren’t permitted to…
MICHAEL WILDES (LAWYER): I would never be surprised
with that. They’re cut off at the hip sometimes by supervisors or given
shots that are being called from Washington at the highest levels….3

Robert Wright

Twelve-year veteran FBI agent Robert Wright Jr. should be proud. Of all of the
FBI “brick” agents who have come forward since 9/11 to describe the deliberate
obstruction of investigations that could have prevented the attacks, no others have
taken the risks or endured the punishment that Wright has. For good reason.

Wright is the only agent in the FBI’s history to have conducted an investigation
of terrorists that resulted in the seizure of financial assets. In 1998 he began
an investigation — since terminated by the FBI — into terrorist money laundering in the United States. That investigation resulted in the seizure of bank accounts
and other assets of Yassin Kadi, who has “since been identified as one of the ‘chief
money launderers’ for Osama bin Laden.” Kadi is reported to have provided as
much as $3 billion to al Qaeda before Wright shut him down.4 (Wright’s investigations
also put a major crimp in the funding for Hamas, another Palestinian related
support group that has been linked to terrorist activities in Israel).

Based in Chicago, home of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) where a great
deal of 9/11-related insider trading was to take place, Wright was in one of the three most
important financial centers of the United States. Nobody moves $3 billion without using
exchanges such as the NYSE or CBOE. It’s just too much money and must move in financial
streams where it would not stand out.

In the only real coverage of Wright’s decision to come forward — which was
coupled with a formal complaint against the FBI for its suppression of him — the
Congressional News Service told a chilling tale as it reported on a press conference
held by Wright and his legal team on May 30, 2002:

In a memorandum written 91 days before the September 11 terrorist
attacks, an FBI agent warned that Americans would die as a result of
the bureau’s failure to adequately pursue investigations of terrorists
living in the country… Wright says that FBI management ‘intentionally
and repeatedly thwarted and obstructed’ his attempts to expand
the investigation to arrest other terrorists and seize their assets .…’ As
a direct result of the incompetence and, at times, intentional obstruction
of justice by FBI management to prevent me from bringing the
terrorists to justice, Americans have unknowingly been exposed to
potential terrorists attacks for years,’ he charged.5

FBI Director Robert Mueller held a May 29, 2002, press conference where he
stated, “It is critically important that I hear criticisms of the organization including
criticisms of me in order to improve the organization.” Meanwhile the FBI was
landing on Wright’s chest with both feet. It had issued Wright written orders not
to discuss what he knew and not to disclose, either in speech or writing, the contents
of an unpublished manuscript entitled Vulgar Betrayal that he had written for
Congress. Wright was threatened in writing with disciplinary action, civil suits,
revocation of security clearances, and even criminal prosecution if he talked. That
letter was received by Wright’s attorney, David Schippers, at 5:00 pm on the same
day Mueller lied to the American people about his pure intentions.6

The next day, Wright concluded his own press conference in tears: “To the
families and victims of September 11th,” he said, “on behalf of [FBI Special
Agents] John Vincent, Barry Carmody, and myself — we’re sorry.”7 But the real
truth of what was done to this ethical law enforcement officer is contained in a
May 22 letter written by Schippers to the FBI and in the words spoken at the press
conference itself.

In writing to Wright’s superior, Chicago Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Thomas
Kneir, Schippers described how Wright had voluntarily given a heads-up about a
New York Times investigation into what had happened with his investigations.
Wright was subsequently ordered not to talk to the press. He complied. Schippers
wrote,

The FBI has failed seriously to address Robert Wright’s work-related
concerns regarding the FBI’s terrorism responsibilities. In fact, we
believe there has been a concerted effort by the FBI to discredit Agent
Wright and minimize his concerns regarding the FBI’s failures in connection
with international terrorism matters prior to September
11th, 2001. In part, this effort includes providing false and misleading
information to the New York Times regarding Agent Wright and
his Vulgar Betrayal investigation. Even more disturbing is the fact that
the FBI has prevented Agent Wright and Special Agent John Vincent
from providing written responses to the New York Times to counter
that false and misleading information .... Agent Wright has also filed
two complaints with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in an
attempt to have his concerns addressed .... To our astonishment, the
DOJ employee advised that, although the allegations were extremely
serious, the Inspector General’s Office did not have the resources to
conduct an investigation of this anticipated size and scope.8

The sheer vindictiveness of a system that seeks to silence whistleblowers was
most fully revealed in the press conference itself, in which it was disclosed that
Wright, Schippers, and attorney Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch (a Washington,
DC-based legal watchdog group) had actually met months before 9/11. They also
disclosed that Wright had written most of his manuscript and decided to speak out
about the repression well before the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
Repeating allegations that Wright had been threatened and intimidated by the
Bureau, Klayman stated that Wright’s manuscript hits both Bush and Cheney
“hard.” That leaves little doubt about where the orders to crush Wright were coming
from. Shippers added that Wright had even been ordered not to talk to Congress.
John Ashcroft was not spared in the scathing statements. Klayman said that “Ashcroft
very likely had all of this information” and didn’t use Wright’s investigative work
to pull the financial plug on al Qaeda before the attacks.

The lawyers also described how Wright had, since voicing his concerns, been
demoted to performing “innocuous tasks”; his office had been moved, computer
equipment had been taken away from him, and he had been forced to purchase
computers with his own money (which he did, out of sheer devotion to his work).
Klayman stated that his office, aware of the direct connections between Wright’s
work and Osama bin Laden, had called Attorney General Ashcroft immediately
after the attacks. The response was terse: “We’re tired of conspiracy theories.”

For a time C-SPAN carried a downloadable video file of the entire compelling
press conference, which received no attention in the major media.9 It has since
been removed.

Kenneth Williams and the Phoenix memo: a CIA connection

On July 10, 2001, Kenneth Williams, the senior special agent from a Phoenix FBI
terrorism task force, sent a memo to FBI headquarters. That memo, resulting from
a seven-year investigation, alerted FBI headquarters that a number of Muslims, suspected
of radical ties, were taking flight lessons in Arizona. It was later confirmed
that Hani Hanjour, who was to be listed as the suspected pilot of the airliner the government
says crashed into the Pentagon, had received his flight training in Arizona.

The memo specifically mentioned Osama bin Laden and warned that terrorists
were possibly going to hijack aircraft or penetrate airport security. Williams
requested that the FBI institute a nationwide survey of aviation schools to ascertain
if there were large numbers of Middle Eastern students enrolled in them. The
request was denied, reportedly for lack of resources.10 The excuse seems weak. A
list of flight schools is readily available through the Internet, and a telephone survey
would have yielded fast results.

Williams was not the first FBI agent in Phoenix to complain about interference
and obstruction by FBI headquarters. In 1994 Special Agent James Hauswirth
complained about it after retiring and wrote a letter of complaint to FBI Director
Mueller in December 2001. Hauswirth wrote, “The [international anti-terrorism]
program ground to a halt a couple of years ago because of the micromanaging,
constant indecision, and stonewalling.”11

There was serious reason for the Phoenix “brick agents” to be concerned. They
had watched some of their suspects who were taking flight training practicing at
pistol ranges, and one of them was an associate of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman,
imprisoned for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.12

After disclosure of the Phoenix memo’s existence in May of 2002, FBI Director
Mueller took the same tack as in the Wright case: he classified it and refused to
show it to members of the Senate panel investigating 9/11. This outraged Senator
Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who threatened a subpoena and a fight.13 Unlike
Wright, Williams — as a result of public pressure — was allowed to testify before
the intelligence panel, and that panel has seen the memorandum that, however,
remains classified. [...is it still? ~ GJP]

Another person who saw the memo was Fortune reporter Richard Behar. This is
the same Richard Behar who was instrumental in destroying the credibility of IranContra
figure Terry Reed in the previous chapter. It seems Mr. Behar is a trusted
asset of intelligence agencies, who should not have disclosed anything the government
didn’t want known. But in his May 22 story on the Phoenix memo, he did.
He described the Phoenix Field office’s interest in a man named Zakaria Soubra:
“Soubra, the memo said, was a student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona (according to the Los Angeles Times, he was questioned by FBI
agents in 2000, after he was observed at a shooting range with another Muslim,
who was a veteran of Islamic jihads in the Balkans and the Middle East…). The
organization named in the memo’s title, the Islamic Army of the Caucasus, is based
in Chechnya and was at one time headed by a man named Amir Khattab, who,
according to news reports, is suspected of having ties to Osama bin Laden.”14

We have previously documented that Chechen rebels were trained in camps
funded and operated by the CIA, and that these operations were connected to
Osama bin Laden, who was acting on behalf of the CIA in both the Balkans
(Kosovo) and Chechnya. Khattab was one of the key players in those operations.

As reported in a previous chapter, Michel Chossudovsky told us why the Williams
memo was so dangerous:

With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and
Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of
the US Congress’ Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit
of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia.15

Williams’s memo was sent to the desk of Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca
at FBI headquarters in Washington, where Frasca sat on it with an anvil. We may
never know what is in the rest of that memo and what Richard Behar kept hidden
for the interests he apparently serves. What has been documented here, however,
is yet another case of senior FBI personnel deliberately suppressing information
that might have prevented the attacks of 9/11 in order to protect CIA assets who
were subsequently connected to those same attacks.

Another major inconsistency in FBI operations is that, in 1995, after receiving
warnings that al Qaeda operatives might be planning to crash hijacked airliners
into CIA headquarters, the FBI “descended” immediately on flight schools all over
the country.16 Yet in 2001 it was too busy.

Colleen Rowley

On May 22, 2002, Minneapolis FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley hand-delivered
a 13-page memorandum to FBI Director Robert Mueller. In keeping with his customary
practices, Mueller immediately classified the memorandum from the
Minneapolis Field Office’s top lawyer “Secret.” That didn’t help much, because
Rowley, claiming protection under the federal whistleblower statute, had also
delivered copies to the Senate Intelligence Committee and two of the Committee’s
members, Republican Richard Shelby and Democrat Diane Feinstein.17

The efforts of Rowley and her fellow brick agents in Minneapolis centered on
the so-called twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been in FBI custody
since August 15 on immigration charges. It seems that for months before 9/11, FBI headquarters (FBIHQ) had systematically blocked every effort to investigate yet
another case that — had it been supported — might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.
Rowley was irritated. It wasn’t long before the memorandum — edited of course
— was published by the likes of TIME, the Associated Press, and Newsweek. Rowley’s
move was supremely well considered and executed in such a way that there was little
else for Congress to do but embrace it. And the best thing to do with Colleen
Rowley is to get out of the way and let her speak for herself.

Dear Director Mueller:
I feel at this point that I have to put my concerns in writing concerning
the important topic of the FBI’s response to evidence of terrorist
activity in the United States prior to September 11th. The issues are
fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY and go to the heart of the FBI’s
law enforcement mission and mandate .…
To get to the point, I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle
shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of
FBI management has occurred and is occurring. The term “cover up”
would be too strong a characterization which is why I am attempting
to carefully (and perhaps over laboriously) choose my words here. I
base my concerns on my relatively small, peripheral but unique role
in the Moussaoui investigation in the Minneapolis Division prior to,
during and after September 11th .…
I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now,
been omitted, downplayed, glossed over, and/or mis-characterized in
an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment
on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political
reasons:…2*) As the Minneapolis agents’ reasonable suspicions quickly ripened
into probable cause, which, at the latest, occurred within days of
Moussaoui’s arrest when the French Intelligence Service confirmed
his affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and
activities connected to Osama Bin Laden, they became desperate
to search the computer lap top that had been taken from Moussaoui
as well as conduct a more thorough search of his personal effects.
The agents in particular believed that Moussaoui signaled he had
something to hide in the way he refused to allow them to search
his computer….3) The Minneapolis agents’ initial thought was to obtain a criminal
search warrant, but in order to do so, they needed to get FBI
Headquarters’ (FBIHQ’s) approval in order to ask for DOJ …
approval to contact the United States Attorney’s Office in Minnesota.
Prior to and even after receipt of information provided by the
French, FBIHQ personnel disputed with the Minneapolis agents
the existence of probable cause to believe that a criminal violation
had occurred/was occurring. As such, FBIHQ personnel refused to
contact [DoJ] to attempt to get the authority. While reasonable
minds may differ as to whether probable cause existed prior to
receipt of the French intelligence information, it was certainly
established after that point and became even greater with successive,
more detailed information from the French and other
intelligence sources… [i.]
Notably also, the actual search warrant obtained on September
11th did not include the French intelligence information. Therefore,
the only main difference between the information being submitted
to FBIHQ from an early date which HQ personnel continued
to deem insufficient and the actual criminal search warrant which
a federal district judge signed and approved on September 11th, was
the fact that, by the time the actual warrant was obtained, suspected
terrorists were known to have highjacked [sic] planes which
they then deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. To say then, as has been iterated numerous times,
that probable cause did not exist until after the disastrous event
occurred, is really to acknowledge that the missing piece of probable
cause was only the FBI’s (FBIHQ’s) failure to appreciate that
such an event could occur ....
It is obvious, from my firsthand knowledge of the events and the
detailed documentation that exists, that the agents in Minneapolis
who were closest to the action and in the best position to gauge the
situation locally, did fully appreciate the terrorist risk/danger posed
by Moussaoui and his possible co-conspirators even prior to
September 11th. Even without knowledge of the Phoenix communication
(and any number of other additional intelligence
communications that FBIHQ personnel were privy to in their
central coordination roles), the Minneapolis agents appreciated the
risk. So I think it’s very hard for the FBI to offer the “20-20 hindsight”
justification for its failure to act! Also intertwined with my
reluctance in this case to accept the “20-20 hindsight” rationale is
first-hand knowledge that I have of statements made on September
11th, after the first attacks on the World Trade Center had already occurred, made telephonically by the FBI Supervisory Special Agent
(SSA) who was the one most involved in the Moussaoui matter
and who, up to that point, seemed to have been consistently, almost
deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents’ efforts (see
number 5). Even after the attacks had begun, the SSA in question
was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s computer,
characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence
with Minneapolis’ prior suspicions about Moussaoui. [ii.] …5) The fact is that key FBIHQ personnel whose job it was to assist
and coordinate with field division agents on terrorism investigations
and the obtaining and use of FISA searches (and who
theoretically were privy to many more sources of intelligence information
than field division agents), continued to, almost
inexplicably [v.] throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis’
by-now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant….
HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions in their
apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause. [vi.] In all of
their conversations and correspondence, HQ personnel never disclosed
to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix Division had,
only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of al Qaeda operatives
in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes!
Nor did FBIHQ personnel do much to disseminate the information
about Moussaoui to other appropriate intelligence/law
enforcement authorities. When, in a desperate 11th hour measure
to bypass the FBIHQ roadblock, the Minneapolis Division undertook
to directly notify the CIA’s Counter Terrorist Center (CTC),
FBIHQ personnel actually chastised the Minneapolis agents for
making the direct notification without their approval!6) Eventually on August 28, 2001, after a series of e-mails between
Minneapolis and FBIHQ, which suggest that the FBIHQ SSA
deliberately further undercut the FISA effort by not adding the
further intelligence information which he had promised to add
that supported Moussaoui’s foreign power connection and making
several changes in the wording of the information that had been
provided by the Minneapolis Agent, the Minneapolis agents were
notified that the NSLU [National Security Law Unit] Unit Chief
did not think there was sufficient evidence of Moussaoui’s connection
to a foreign power....
The e-mail communications between Minneapolis and FBIHQ,
however, speak for themselves and there are far better witnesses
than me who can provide their first hand knowledge of these
events characterized in one Minneapolis agent’s e-mail as FBIHQ is “setting this up for failure.” My only comment is that the process
of allowing the FBI supervisors to make changes in affidavits is
itself fundamentally wrong .… understand that the failures of the
FBIHQ personnel involved in the Moussaoui matter are also being
officially excused because they were too busy with other investigations,
the Cole bombing and other important terrorism matters,
but the Supervisor’s taking of the time to read each word of the
information submitted by Minneapolis and then substitute his
own choice of wording belies to some extent the notion that he
was too busy. As an FBI division legal advisor for 12 years (and an
FBI agent for over 21 years), I can state that an affidavit is better
and will tend to be more accurate when the affiant has first hand
information of all the information he/she must attest to…. but
changes of some substance as apparently occurred with the
Moussaoui information which had to be, for lack of a better term,
“filtered” through FBIHQ before any action, whether to seek a
criminal or a FISA warrant, could be taken .... Even after September
11th, the fear was great on the part of Minneapolis Division personnel
that the same FBIHQ personnel would continue their
“filtering” with respect to the Moussaoui investigation, and now
with the added incentive of preventing their prior mistakes from
coming to light. For this reason, for weeks, Minneapolis prefaced
all outgoing communications (ECs) in the PENTTBOM investigation
with a summary of the information about Moussaoui. We
just wanted to make sure the information got to the proper prosecutive
authorities and was not further suppressed!…7) Although the last thing the FBI or the country needs now is a
witch hunt, I do find it odd that (to my knowledge) no inquiry
whatsoever was launched of the relevant FBIHQ personnel’s
actions a long time ago. Despite FBI leaders’ full knowledge of all
the items mentioned herein (and probably more that I’m unaware
of), the SSA, his unit chief, and other involved HQ personnel
were allowed to stay in their positions and, what’s worse, occupy
critical positions in the FBI’s SIOC Command Center post
September 11th. (The SSA in question actually received a promotion
some months afterward!)…8) The last official “fact” that I take issue with is not really a fact, but
an opinion, and a completely unsupported opinion at that. In the
day or two following September 11th, you, Director Mueller, made
the statement to the effect that if the FBI had only had any
advance warning of the attacks, we (meaning the FBI), may have
been able to take some action to prevent the tragedy .…
The official statement is now to the effect that even if the FBI had
followed up on the Phoenix lead to conduct checks of flight schools
and the Minneapolis request to search Moussaoui’s personal effects
and laptop, nothing would have changed and such actions certainly
could not have prevented the terrorist attacks and resulting
loss of life. With all due respect, this statement is as bad as the first!
Mr. Director… I think you have also not been completely honest
about some of the true reasons for the FBI’s pre-September 11th
failures....
NOTES
…[v.] During the early aftermath of September 11th, when I happened
to be recounting the pre-September 11th events
concerning the Moussaoui investigation to other FBI personnel
in other divisions or in FBIHQ, almost everyone’s
first question was “Why? — Why would an FBI agent(s)
deliberately sabotage a case?” (I know I shouldn’t be flippant
about this, but jokes were actually made that the key
FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert
Hansen, who were actually working for Osama bin Laden
to have so undercut Minneapolis’ effort.)…
Along these lines, let me ask the question, why has it suddenly
become necessary for the Director to “handpick” the
FBI management? It’s quite conceivable that many of the
HQ personnel who so vigorously disputed Moussaoui’s ability/predisposition to fly a plane into a building were simply
unaware of all the various incidents and reports worldwide
of al Qaeda terrorists attempting or plotting to do so....
[vi.] ...for the SSA continued to find new reasons to stall…
[viii.] For starters, if prevention rather than prosecution is to be our
new main goal, (an objective I totally agree with), we need
more guidance on when we can apply the Quarles “public
safety” exception to Miranda’s 5th Amendment requirements.
We were prevented from even attempting to question
Moussaoui on the day of the attacks when, in theory, he
could have possessed further information about other coconspirators.
(Apparently no government attorney believes
there is a “public safety” exception in a situation like this?!)18
[*order as shown appearing in the book]

Thus Moussaoui, who had paid the $7,000 for his flight lessons in cash; who
was, according to press reports, not interested in learning how to take off or land;
who wanted to know if the doors of an airliner could be opened in flight; and
who was particularly interested in air traffic patterns around New York City, remained totally protected until after the attacks of 9/11 had taken place. And it
was subsequently revealed that Zacarias Moussaoui had also fought in Chechnya
where some of the players had been connected to CIA training camps.

The French had been following Moussaoui for years. In the 1990s
they tracked him to London where he learned militant Islam from
radical clerics including Abu Qatada. French intelligence has linked
Qatada to Osama bin Laden. Qatada preaches a particularly violent
brand of Islam and encourages Muslims to take up jihad wherever
they can. So Moussaoui took that advice and went to Chechnya to
join Muslims in their fight against Russian troops. French intelligence
was aware of that move and his later trip to Afghanistan.19

Zacaria Soubra from the Phoenix investigation and Zacarias Moussaoui in
Minneapolis had something in common, other than allegiance to Osama bin Laden,
which other members of al Qaeda did not. They had both fought in Chechnya and
both had met Amir al-Khattab who had been trained at CIA-operated and sponsored
camps. Conveniently, Khattab was reported killed in action in Chechnya in April
2002, just before the Williams and Rowley memos became news. Khattab’s death
was denied by Chechen rebel leaders.20 Was a key witness being placed out of reach?

During my time as an LAPD officer and in the years since, I have met several
FBI agents, including one former assistant director, who bragged about the FBI’s
ability to conduct “black bag” burglaries (surreptitious entries) during the 1960s
and 1970s. Search warrants were never even a consideration. Keep this in mind as
you reread the Rowley memo on the amazing refusal of FBI leadership to grant the
field agents a FISA warrant. With Moussaoui’s laptop in their possession for weeks
before the attacks, it is very probable that they had already examined all of its contents.
The reason why they needed the warrant was to make the evidence they had
found admissible. Numerous press stories since 9/11 have indicated that the contents
of that laptop will be used to convict Moussaoui of complicity in the attacks
and most probably sentence him to death. I can only imagine the “off-the-record”
conversations that took place between the brick agents in Minnesota and
Washington as the brick agents — knowing of a certainty what was coming —
tried in vain to get their search warrant.

And who was the supervisory special agent in Washington who brutalized the
Minneapolis agents; who rewrote search warrants; who lied, obstructed, roadblocked,
chastised, and suppressed? It was the same agent who received the
Phoenix memo and sat on it: one Dave Frasca.

Carnivore

In March 2000 Denver FBI agents and other reviewing agents were “furious” after
other agents in the bin Laden unit and at the International Terrorism Operations
Center destroyed significant quantities of e-mail intercepts (received under authorization of a warrant) for a case connected to al Qaeda. The explanation
given for the destruction of material of both evidentiary and intelligence value was
that an e-mail surveillance system called Carnivore had errantly intercepted emails
from additional innocent parties whose privacy had been violated. As a
result, “‘The FBI technical person was apparently so upset that he destroyed all the
e-mail take, including the take on the suspect ....” 21 “Take” means raw intelligence
that has been collected but not yet analyzed.

This explanation is absurd, transparent, laughable, and offensive. It plainly
contravenes 80 years of known FBI practice. Not only does it not make sense that
the FBI wouldn’t segregate the sought-after intelligence from that which was inadvertently
collected; there was, in fact, a legal requirement that they not destroy
anything at all. The Associated Press quoted Henry Perritt, the head of a review
panel: “The collection is supposed to be retained for judicial review .… If an agent
simply deleted a whole bunch of files without the court instructing, that’s not the
way it’s supposed to work.”22

Indeed, since a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant was involved
in this case, the destruction of anything collected or seized as a result of that warrant
is one of the most serious legal violations known. This would be true with any
warrant. And yet it was confirmed that the decision to do so had been made within
the UBL (bin Laden) unit, the same unit involved in the preceding cases. Here
again we find Dave Frasca.

A Washington Post story confirmed the above details but did not ask the obvious
questions about why the entire take had been destroyed in direct violation of
legal requirements calling for judicial review. It blamed the inappropriate collections
on a problem with an Internet service provider. But even the Post story
acknowledged — quoting an internal FBI memo — “To state that she [the memo’s
author] is unhappy with [the International Terrorist Operations Section] and the
UBL Unit would be an understatement of incredible proportions.”23

What was described here was not some frustrated, untrained agent knowingly
destroying material out of an offended sense of dignity over a loss of privacy by
victims who never even knew about it. What more likely happened was a deliberate
destruction of intelligence information leading to Osama bin Laden that
someone could not afford to have in any files where a dedicated agent might find
it and start asking questions or putting people in jail. The use of the Carnivore
program also suggests that whoever was running the unit had led field agents to
believe that whatever they collected in this manner was legally admissible — and
therefore protected from deletion. But in reality, both stories suggested that the
program was still under evaluation and open to challenge. The field agents didn’t
know this. The result would be a built-in ability to destroy any prosecution using
this material and allow the al Qaeda suspects to go free as a result of tainted evidence,
while allowing gatekeepers at FBI headquarters to know how close agents
were actually getting to sensitive covert operations.

Dave Frasca

Before concluding that Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca of the Radical
Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters was the primary agent responsible for the
deliberate, willful, and arguably harmful suppression of evidence and of investigations
that could well have prevented 9/11, a couple of key questions need to be
addressed. Various press reports have described FBI units with oversight in these
cases as the UBL (Osama bin Laden) Unit and as the Radical Fundamentalist
Unit. Are they referring to the same thing? Secondly, is there any indication that
any member of Congress or of any other oversight body has noticed at least some
of these connections?

Dave Frasca was, until early 2002, the chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit
within the FBI’s Counterterrorism/Counterespionage branch. In that capacity,
according to press reports, he oversaw the operations of several subunits, one of
which apparently was the bin Laden or UBL unit. One ABC report said, “The
Bureau’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit, headed by Supervisory Special Agent Dave
Frasca, and its Osama bin Laden Unit first got a memo that Phoenix FBI agent
Ken Williams sent in early July.”24 The UBL unit was created, according to a statement
by an FBI official, in 1999.25

A description of the duties of the RFU and its chief was found on the website
of the high-technology, intelligence-connected SAIC Corporation, based in San
Diego, which recently hired Frasca’s predecessor, retired Supervisory Special Agent
Robert Blitzer. SAIC’s website gave a telling description of Frasca’s duties, as he followed
in Blitzer’s footsteps.

From 1993 to 1996, Blitzer served as chief of the Radical Fundamentalist
Unit, Counterterrorism and Middle East Section at FBI Headquarters.
As the leader of this unit, he was responsible for overall national coordination,
oversight, and direction of all criminal and intelligence
operations against the international terrorists who bombed the World
Trade Center and who attempted to conduct a wave of bombings in
and around New York City in early 1993.26

According to FBI spokesman Neal Schiff, Frasca’s tenure in the RFU position
lasted from 1999 until he was promoted in 2002. Frasca is currently the Assistant
Section Chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section I. Schiff was
ambiguous, at best, in describing the relationship between the RFU and the UBL
units. While maintaining that the two were completely separate units, Schiff
refused to confirm or deny that Frasca had supervisory responsibility for the UBL
unit. At the same time he would not deny numerous press reports indicating that
Frasca did work both units. The Phoenix memorandum was sent to the UBL unit,
and Frasca apparently had a role in the decision not to follow up on it. As to the
Wright case, and in contrast to statements given by Department of Justice officials
on condition of anonymity confirming the RFU’s role in squashing the Wright investigation, Schiff declined to confirm or deny any relationship. “That case is
still pending and I can’t comment,” he said.

But the link between Robert Wright’s oppressors and FBI headquarters was
established only days after my office received the official statements from Schiff.
On December 19, 2002, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross aired an
interview with Wright and his partner John Vincent in which Wright stated, “The
supervisor who was there from headquarters was right across from me and started
yelling at me: ‘You will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You
will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects.’”27

It was made clear in the story that the Wright/Vincent investigations had
stemmed from the 1998 African embassy bombings and that the money trail led
to Osama bin Laden. This would have placed the investigation within the UBL,
Radical Fundamentalist Unit, and under the direct control of Dave Frasca. Schiff’s
assertion that the two units are separate and distinct entities is belied by Senate
documents, press stories, and Frasca’s own conduct post-9/11. A May 24, 2002,
letter from Senator Patrick Leahy to FBI Director Mueller said:

A press account on May 22 states that the Radical Fundamentalist
Unit at FBI headquarters had decided not to pursue the recommendations
in the Phoenix memorandum before September 11, 2001,
since according to “officials… the FBI counterterrorism division was
swamped with urgent matters.” Another press account on May 23
contains a correction by “a senior FBI official” and [stated] that the
FBI’s “Osama bin Laden Unit was responsible” for the decision rejecting
the recommendations ....28

Leahy’s letter, in conformity with press stories, shows the interconnectedness of
the two units, and Frasca’s roles in cases involving both units is underscored by the
fact that he was the agent (and in some cases, the only agent) who provided congressional
testimony on all of these matters, whether they involved the RFU or the
UBL unit. Schiff was unable to resolve these contradictions and went into “no
comment” mode about press stories or congressional correspondence.

Knowing all this, it is now possible to state that Frasca almost certainly had
direct oversight responsibility for all five of the previously described incidents. FBI
sources I contacted confirmed, on condition of anonymity, that the RFU was the
control point for all of these cases and that Frasca issued the orders thwarting
investigations that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Looking at Frasca’s
actions, both in terms of their frequency and in terms of their consistency, it
stretches the imagination to accept press accounts attributing FBI “screw-ups” relevant
to 9/11 to incompetence, lack of resources, or overwork. There is a pattern
here, rationally explained in only one way. Someone at the FBI, or elsewhere in
government, needed to make sure that al Qaeda members were left in place —
either to perpetrate the attacks or to take the blame for them afterwards. And the Frasca connections — at least insofar as Minneapolis and Phoenix are concerned
— were noticed. Frasca testified before both the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence
committees, and many problems followed. First, Frasca told the Judiciary committee
that he didn’t see the Phoenix memo until after the 9/11 attacks. Later his
statement was corrected to indicate that had seen the Phoenix memo before 9/11,
but that the UBL unit had rejected the request for a survey of flight schools. His
statement was different from press accounts which indicated that because the
memo was marked routine, the deadline for response to it was 60 days, which
would have been after 9/11 — so Frasca had taken no action.

Senators Patrick Leahy, Charles Grassley, and Arlen Specter were understandably
miffed, especially when Leahy disclosed that he had acquiesced to a special
request from Mueller to hold the secret hearing where Frasca testified without a
stenographer or a transcript. Mueller didn’t seem to have minded, however, when
the Intelligence Committee was allowed to make a transcript of Frasca’s statements
for its members.

On May 24, 2002, Leahy closed a terse and eloquent letter to Mueller on the
subject, signed also by Grassley and Specter:

Finally, it has been noted that Supervisory Special Agent Dave Frasca
in the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) may have been involved in
handling the Phoenix memorandum and the Moussaoui investigation
at FBI headquarters. [This had been previously confirmed in a number
of press stories. The FBI only started changing their position after
people started asking questions. - MCR] Please explain his role and the
role of the RFU in evaluating the requests from the Minneapolis field
office in the Moussaoui case; what connection, if any, he or others drew
between the two ongoing investigations; and whether he or others
brought such a connection to the attention of higher level FBI officials.
If a briefing rather than a written answer would facilitate your
response to the questions regarding agent Frasca, please let us know ....29

Some senators were a bit less polite in their remarks. Senator Richard Shelby,
the Republican ranking member of the intelligence committee, was quoted as saying,
“The information coming from Phoenix and the information coming from
Minneapolis was stifled here at FBI headquarters.” Senator Grassley of Iowa decried
“sabotage” by FBI officials.30

A secret team

To understand how someone like Dave Frasca functioned inside the FBI, one
needs to understand how the CIA and other intelligence agencies place their people
throughout the government. Frasca fits that pattern perfectly. For those
unfamiliar with the way covert operations function within the United States government,
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of two books: The Secret Team by the late Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (the Pentagon’s liaison with
the CIA during the 1960s), and CIA Diary by former CIA Case Officer Philip
Agee. Other excellent case studies in this area are found in The CIA and the Cult
of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. Operational patterns
described by all of these men are confirmed by hundreds of declassified documents
that have surfaced in investigations like those conducted by the Senate’s Church
committee in the 1970s.

To sum up the lessons clearly explained in both books, all one needs to understand
is that the CIA routinely places its deep cover agents in every branch of the
US government, especially within the FBI, the DEA, and federal law enforcement
agencies. They even do it with municipal police departments such as LAPD,
NYPD, or the Chicago PD. The CIA attempted to recruit me in 1973 as a college
senior, and the proposition was made that I become a case officer with CIA and
then return to LAPD, go through their Academy, and use the LAPD position as a
cover. Although I declined that offer and have never taken a penny from the CIA,
I was able to find out years later that the CIA, because of my family connections
to the Agency and the NSA*, had actually steered several of my assignments as an
LAPD intern while I was an undergraduate at UCLA. When the CIA places its
agents inside the US military, the process is routinely called “sheep dipping.” [*For the unfamiliar, it may interest readers to know Mike had Q clearance due to his parent's intelligence positions. ~ GJP]

Why would the CIA do this? Frasca’s behavior is right out of the textbook. At
LAPD I saw CIA assets and contractors with access to narcotics investigations
making deliberate decisions as to who got arrested and who got away. Gary Webb
documented one such instance in Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the
Crack Cocaine Explosion when he looked at massive CIA-connected cocaine shipments
into Los Angeles. CIA assets doing CIA’s bidding are always protected.
There is no way to conclusively state that Dave Frasca either worked or works for
the CIA, either as a case officer or as an asset. But the role he played before 9/11
clearly served interests other than those of the FBI or the innocent Americans
killed or bereaved by the attacks. The power of this secret team is that they are
always able to protect their assets, no matter how badly they are exposed. And, as
Colleen Rowley noted, Frasca was actually promoted right after 9/11.

Tyrone Powers

On May 19, 2002, retired FBI Special Agent Tyrone Powers, currently the director
of the Institute of Criminal Justice/Legal Studies and Public Service, also an assistant
professor of law enforcement and criminal justice, was a guest on New York City’s
radio station 98.7 KIIS. He had some interesting things to say about 9/11. According
to an Internet report by Dennis Shipman based upon a transcript of the broadcast,
Powers made statements that are consistent with what we have just described.

Tyrone Powers, a former African American FBI special agent, announced
on NYC’s … 98.7 KIIS FM … hosted by news director and morning personality Bob Slade, that he had credible evidence strongly suggesting
the Bush administration did in fact allow the September 11th
attacks to further a hidden agenda .…
Like [sic] Pearl Harbor, the US government needed a substantive
excuse to enter World War II and end German hegemony over Europe
generally and England particularly .… So an environment had to be
created causing an anticipated furor enabling the Roosevelt administration
to declare war against this “axis of evil ....”
Does this scenario sound familiar? It ought to, because Powers
argues persuasively that the Bush administration has taken a page from
history in its endeavor to maintain control over rapidly dwindling oil
reserves in the world generally and in the Middle East particularly ....
Powers claims that the Bush administration superciliously perceives
itself to be the last world super power; an Empire and, by some
misguided albeit self-serving divine right, has to sometimes make
appalling decisions to further its imperialistic aim, which is the total,
unequivocal domination of the world and, more tellingly, its mineral
resources.31

During my post-9/11 investigations I verified that Powers had indeed appeared
on the broadcast. I also verified his credentials, both as former FBI agent and current
professor at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland. He did not
return several calls asking for further comment.

Sibel Edmonds

Initially it was bureaucratic infighting for more funding that derailed important
security investigations and questions about contacts of a co-worker with targets
of an FBI anti-terror investigation that prompted 33-year-old Sibel Edmonds
to blow the whistle inside the FBI in 2002. Hired on an emergency basis and given
a Top Secret clearance immediately after 9/11 because of her ability to speak fluent
Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani, Edmonds was promptly put to work
translating mountains of audio recordings, videotapes, and written communications.
By 2004 her complaints were to become much more serious.

At first she heard her supervisors telling her to slow down and not rush important
translations. The ostensible purpose for this foot-dragging at a time of great danger
was to allow FBI managers to ask for additional funding because they were so far
behind. Then she saw civilian translators leaving FBI headquarters with classified
material against regulations. The last straw was when a Turkish-American colleague,
married to a Major in the US Air Force, disclosed that she had ongoing relationships
with a Turkish organization that was an active FBI target. The colleague, Melek
Dickerson, suggested that Edmonds should meet people in the organization and get
involved. It got worse when Edmonds allegedly discovered that Dickerson had
attempted to arrange it so that all translations concerning the Turkish organization would be done by Dickerson exclusively. However, it was also an organization covered
in the “take” given to Edmonds, and she became suspicious.

Acting on those suspicions, Edmonds ordered files previously translated by
Dickerson, checked them, and found that material information relating to terrorist
investigations and espionage had been deleted, left un-translated, or marked as
irrelevant.32

Edmonds — a neophyte with no prior intelligence training — assumed the
worst but failed to comprehend the possibility that she was being “pitched” to spy
on an organization that may have already been penetrated. In that eventuality an
intelligence operation could be used to plant false information or perhaps even to
manipulate other assets who might believe they were receiving orders from Islamic
fundamentalist terrorists. Sanitized translations would prevent FBI agents from
compromising a CIA operation in Turkey.

Published photos depict Edmonds as strikingly attractive; people like her are
often prime subjects for recruitment as intelligence assets while being given as little
information as possible as to how they are being used. In very sensitive operations
if the “asset” has no knowledge that he or she is being “run,” so much the better.
One term used to refer to such assets in the intelligence community is “Dixie cups”
because they are often used once and thrown away. Such “assets” are expendable.

The likelihood that Edmonds was being “pitched” was confirmed by a Senate
intelligence staffer.33 Yet if she was being pitched over an operation that had to do
with identifying real terrorist threats, whoever was doing it was going about it the
wrong way. Following the rulebook she had been given, Edmonds did exactly what
would have been expected of a loyal employee. She complained first to her immediate
supervisors and finally, in March of 2002, to the FBI’s Office of Professional
Responsibility (OPR) and then to the FBI’s Inspector General.34

Her contract was terminated for the convenience of the government in March
2002 but not until after she had received threats, both direct and implied, from
FBI supervisors and from Dickerson.35 Her next stops were Congress and 60
Minutes where she got a much better reception as she sought to find out what had
happened and correct what she felt were genuine problems. Senator Charles
Grassley found her convincing and credible.36 In stories throughout 2002
Edmonds’ plight was discussed in the press but there was no discussion of advance
warnings of attacks known to the FBI or the White House. Edmonds filed suit
against the FBI over its refusal to respond to her Freedom of Information Act
request and against the Department of Justice for an improper termination. She
was followed routinely, especially to court appearances. Attorney General John
Ashcroft, in response to a request from FBI Director Mueller, sought and obtained
a gag order restricting what Edmonds could say about her case. The authority
invoked to secure the order was the rarely used “State Secrets” privilege.37 The
same privilege was invoked again by the Justice Department in April 2004 as
Edmonds was subpoenaed to give a deposition in a $100 trillion civil suit against Saudi interests for their alleged connections to the 9/11 attacks. A massive public
response, including activist challenges to US Marshals and the clerk in US District
court over an attempt to hold a closed hearing on the motion to quash Edmonds’s
subpoena, apparently caught the government by surprise. One of those who challenged
the Marshal’s move to close the hearing was African-American former
26-year CIA counterterror case officer Leutrell Osborne. Osborne is also the
source from whom I received the unedited Izvestia story which went into great
detail about an explicit warning sent (including targets and dates) directly from
Russian President Vladimir Putin just days before the attacks.38

After the confrontation and an apparent huddle in chambers, Judge Reggie
Walton decided to open the hearing. It was decided that he would issue a temporary
order to quash the subpoena but would not render a final decision until
sometime in June. As this book goes to press, the issue has not been decided.

As Edmonds’s various legal matters continued into 2004 the 9/11 Commission
chaired by former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean came in to the spotlight as
pressure from victim families, activists, and the mounting pile of documentation
flatly contradicting the Bush administration’s statements collided with the scheduled
testimony of many key witnesses including Richard Clarke, John Ashcroft,
Robert Mueller, George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice.

At the same time that pressure was building for Rice to testify in public,
Edmonds gave testimony to the commission. According to Salon, she told the
commissioners that “the FBI had detailed information prior to September 11,
2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted.”39 In a number
of press interviews after Rice’s testimony, and after the publication of an op-ed in
which Rice stated that the administration had no specific information of a domestic
threat or that airplanes might be used as weapons, Edmonds said, “That’s an
outrageous lie. And documents can prove it’s a lie.”40

Unfortunately in the same interview, Edmonds also expressed the view that
when George W. Bush said that “they had” no specific information about
September 11, he was telling the truth. Perhaps if Edmonds had been permitted to
speak with some of her other colleagues she might feel differently; the system does
an equally good job of isolating whistleblowers from the media and from each
other. Alternatively, she may have been confining her criticism to the FBI out of a
desire to choose her battles, or perhaps to protect some ally elsewhere in the administration
whose responsibility included alerting the president. But all this is far less
likely than a genuine ignorance on Edmonds’s part; she knew enough to discredit
Rice, then gave Bush the benefit of the doubt in the absence of better information
about the president’s knowledge — information other whistleblowers had.

Steve Butler

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Steve Butler was yet another person with inside
knowledge who spilled the beans about US government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. While Vice Chancellor of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey,
California, Butler wrote a chilling May 26 letter to his local paper. It read:

A contemptible offense
It’s about time conservative idiots like Steve Kelly and Rod Musgrove
got a dose of reality. Of course President Bush knew about the
impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American
people because he needed this war on terrorism. His daddy had
Saddam and he needed Osama.
His presidency was going nowhere. He wasn’t elected by the
American people, but placed into the Oval Office by the conservative
Supreme Court. The economy was sliding into the usual Republican
pits and he needed something on which to hang his presidency.
For them to accuse Democrats of being “sleazy” is laughable. Isn’t
it ironic that Kelly begins his inane babble with a reference to Monica
Lewinsky? How many people died because of Monica Lewinsky? And
for Musgrove to call the assertions “contemptible” is another joke.
Funny how he manages to make disparaging remarks about President
Clinton, as well.
Face it people, Bill Clinton was a great president. This guy is a
joke.
What is sleazy and contemptible is the President of the United
States not telling the American people what he knows for political
gain. The Democrats asking pertinent questions is their duty as public
servants.
Steve Butler
Monterey.41

Butler’s letter was startling when I learned of it by reading mainstream stories
that Butler had been suspended for it — and was facing a court martial.42 In fact a multitude of press reports, including stories from the New York
Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek, all published between September 15
and 17, 2001, disclosed that at least five of the hijackers had received US military
training at bases in the US, including flight lessons. Among the latter was
Mohammed Atta, who apparently received his training while wanted for terrorist
activities. Atta’s US military training was confirmed by a separate story
published by Knight Ridder at a time when many of the military training connections
were causing the military to engage in some disingenuous doubletalk.
Several subsequent stories indicated that while the five names matched up with
9/11 hijackers, it was apparently a case of more than one person having the same
name. Yet the Department of Defense has not to this date disclosed the identities
of the five people whose names matched those of 9/11 hijackers. Even more compelling is the fact that Newsweek reported three of the hijackers had received
flight training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station.43

All told, 14 of the 19 9/11 hijackers lived and studied for a considerable period
in southern Florida. No one has done a better job of investigating the
connections of these hijackers to military and intelligence operations than investigative
journalist Dan Hopsicker. His investigations have also produced
compelling evidence linking Rudi Dekkers, the operator of the flight school
attended by Atta and others, to US intelligence operations and the destruction
and/or immediate confiscation of incriminating records immediately after the
attacks with the hands-on involvement of Florida Governor Jeb Bush.44 Hopsicker, a
former broadcast news producer for MS-NBC, has produced a compelling video
called Mohammed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus that details many of these links.
He maintains a detailed website at: http://www.madcowprod.com/ [inexplicably, in the
summer of 2004, Hopsicker performed a startling flip-flop by choosing to agree
with most of the Kean Commission’s highly questionable findings.]

How did Steve Butler fare? In June the Air Force announced that it had concluded
its investigation and that Butler was going to face nonjudicial punishment
likely to consist of a letter of reprimand. Had he chosen, Butler could have insisted
on a court martial and public trial wherein he could have, and most likely
would have, exposed direct links between the military and the hijackers. I finally
located Butler in the summer of 2004. He confirmed having written the letter, but
denied any contact with or knowledge of the hijackers. His school, the DLI, was only
responsible for foreign language training. English language training was conducted
at other facilities.

In spite of the US government’s position that there was no compelling case that
an attack on the US by al Qaeda was imminent, there was apparently one person
who was paying very close attention to the information coming in from the brick
agents in the field. In July 2001 Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on
commercial airlines altogether, opting instead for a chartered government jet. This,
according to one story, was because of threat assessments from the FBI.45

*******

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42 “Air Force Officer Suspended for Criticizing Bush,” Reuters, June 4, 2002, www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.06E.butler.bush.htm [Link broken. His name is listed among many other patriots here: http://patriotsquestion911.com/military]

43 George Wehrfritz, Catharine Skipp, and John Barry, “Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases. The Pentagon has turned over military records on five men to the FBI,” Newsweek, September 15, 2001, https://www.wanttoknow.info/010915newsweek

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